cleanaway's own health report fails to assess scenic rim farming risk

Documents submitted with the Bromelton incinerator application reveal commercial agriculture was excluded from the food safety assessment

The community campaign opposing a proposed waste incinerator at Bromelton has found a critical gap at the heart of Cleanaway's own health assessment - the 310-page report does not assess what the facility's emissions could mean for the Scenic Rim's commercial farming industry.

The Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA), prepared by consultants engaged by Cleanaway and submitted as part of the Environmental Impact Statement for the Bromelton Energy and Resource Centre (BERC), explicitly limits its food safety modelling to "home grown produce wholly consumed by those living on a property where the produce is grown."

Commercial beef, dairy, egg and vegetable production, the industries that make the Scenic Rim Queensland's primary food production corridor , are not assessed.

"This isn't alarmism. It's in their own documents. Cleanaway's consultants assessed what happens to someone's backyard vegetable patch. They did not assess what dioxins and PFAS could do to the beef, dairy, eggs and vegetables this region produces at scale for Queensland and national markets", says Lizz Hills, member of the BERC stakeholder reference group.

The Scenic Rim's agricultural sector contributes more than $400 million annually to the regional economy and supports over 4,000 local jobs. Dioxins and PFAS, persistent pollutants emitted during waste incineration, are known to bioaccumulate in animal fat and persist in soil for decades.

The same document reveals a second significant gap which is there is no air quality baseline for Bromelton. Instead of measuring what pollutants are currently in the air at the proposed site, the report uses monitoring data from Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, collected around the year 2000. Without a rural Scenic Rim baseline, it is not possible to determine the true incremental burden BERC would impose on local air quality.

The campaign has made three formal requests to the Coordinator-General: an extension of the public submission response period; mandatory independent baseline air quality monitoring that covers dioxins, PFAS, PAHs and heavy metals, and an independent traffic and road impact assessment for the Mount Lindesay Highway corridor. The findings from the assessments directly support each of these requests.

At an upcoming community stakeholder session, the campaign will put specific questions to Cleanaway, including asking why commercial agriculture was excluded from the food safety assessment, and whether the company has post-treatment PFAS emission measurements from any facility using the same technology proposed for BERC.

"The Scenic Rim's food security and the livelihoods of our farmers deserve a genuine answer not a reference to a document that doesn't cover them", says Erica Bates, Keep the Scenic Rim Scenic.



• The BERC Human Health Risk Assessment (CLEAN/25/BERC001-F, Final 15 July 2026) was prepared by Environmental Risk Sciences Pty Ltd (enRiskS) for Cleanaway Operations Pty Ltd